


my best kept secret

by beccasaur



Category: Marvel
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-18
Updated: 2014-03-18
Packaged: 2018-01-16 06:12:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1334986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beccasaur/pseuds/beccasaur
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are always secrets. That's the world that they live in; nobody knows the entire truth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	my best kept secret

**Author's Note:**

> Written for #BuckyNat Week. I'm taking fic prompts over on [my Tumblr](http://tyrelled.tumblr.com/ask).

There are always secrets. That's the world that they live in; nobody knows the entire truth. Not even those in charge. It's better that way.

She gets used to keeping things to herself quickly. What she remembers of her family is _hers_ and no-one else's. She doesn't even share it when the other girls in the dormitory whisper about their past lives in an attempt to cling to their identity. Natalia knows who she is. She doesn't feel the need to reaffirm it, when she knows.

(What she doesn't realise is that she'll lose it, that there will be a time when she doesn't remember her family, has nothing more than glimpses of hair as red as her own and the sensation of burning alive. Maybe then, she'll wish that someone else knows her, too.)

But she listens, she takes note. When one of the girls can't stop crying, she finds herself on her bed, comforting her with an awkward hand to her shoulder. She is not a comforting, warm person, and yet they must care for one another. There is nobody else who will.

That becomes a secret, too, a shared one. Her life is taken up with them.

Her biggest secret is _him_ , though. They don't know about him; they know what's in her head, because they put it all there, removing what had once been hers and replacing it with their own desires, what they think she needs, but they don't know what's in her heart.

Probably because she's not expected to have one.

They don't know how her breath comes a little shorter when he's in the room, how when he knocks her to the floor, she can't even mind, because of his weight on top of her. They don't know about secret looks, brushes of knees against each other in the dining hall, how she feels like her heart might explode the first time he smiles, in the showers after training, a result of her kissing him for the first time.

He touches his lips with that metal hand of his, as though committing the feel to memory, and then he touches her cheek, surprisingly tender, when she knows the power that lays in that limb. She would kiss him again, but he's gone before she has the chance to.

She doesn't let them steal the memory of his touch.

Nor do they know about a rendezvous after a mission, kisses in the snow, the adrenaline rush from the kill making him press her against the wall of the alley they duck into until she is breathless and wanting.

They don't know that she is the first person he seeks out when he wakes up, they don't know the glimpses of the man beneath the weapon that she finds herself with. They don't see the pain in his eyes, hidden beneath the hardness and the ice, that he is just as broken and lost as she is. They don't know how warm his touch is, for a man so cold, how even the metal of his hand can warm against her skin.

Maybe the ice around his heart can, as well.

They don't know his name. He's only _the American_ , only the Winter Soldier.

He is James, to her. That's a secret, too.

Nobody knows her guilt at leaving him behind when she lets herself be caught by the other side, at leaving him in one of those stasis tanks that broke her heart, the first time she saw him there. She would have brought him with her, had it been possible; she hopes he knows that.

She hopes he still knows her.

He was always her secret. And so she keeps that. Tells of the ghost, of the weapon, but not the man. Says he trained her, but not that he loved her. Keeping him secret will not compromise the mission; there are some things that do not need to be known.


End file.
